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Citizen Action and National Policy Reform
Making Change Happen
By John Gaventa, Rosemary McGee Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2010 John Gaventa and Rosemary McGee
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-387-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: making change happen – citizen action and national policy reform
JOHN GAVENTA AND ROSEMARY MCGEE
How can ordinary citizens – and the organizations and movements with which they engage – make changes in national policies which affect their lives, and the lives of others around them? Under what conditions does citizen action contribute to more responsive states, pro-poor policies and greater social justice? What is needed to overcome setbacks, and to consolidate smaller victories into 'successful' change? These are the questions taken up by this book. Understanding the answers is important for a number of contemporary debates that cut across policy, activist and academic circles.
In international development debates, the challenge of building responsive and accountable states which in turn will work to alleviate poverty, protect rights and tackle social inequalities has been a focus of attention in recent years. Much of the debate centres on improving the institutions of government – state bureaucracies, parliaments and justice systems. Yet, as this book demonstrates, states are not built through institutions alone. Organized citizens also play a critical role, through articulating their concerns, mobilizing pressure for change and monitoring government performance.
For those concerned with citizen advocacy, in recent years there has been a great deal of attention on building global or transnational citizen action, as witnessed in significant citizen mobilizations such as the Make Poverty History campaign on aid, trade and debt in 2005, as well as the continuing Global Call to Action Against Poverty, the UN Millennium Campaign, and now campaigns on climate justice. Yet increasingly, activists in these campaigns are also turning their attention to the importance of national policy change, with the realization that unless there are changes at this level, international policies will have little traction.
Similarly, an explosion of work over the last decade has focused on citizen participation and citizen mobilization to strengthen the 'voice' of civil society actors in governance and development programmes. Much of this has been on the local level, or on forms of public 'consultation', which – while broadening participation – often lack real power to make a change. Recognition is mounting that policy change must scale up from the local to embrace the national as well, and that programmes for citizen participation must go beyond articulating voice to exerting real influence. How can this be done?
Drawing from eight case studies in which organized citizen action has contributed to significant national policy changes, this book will engage with, and we hope bring fresh insights to, these debates. Looking across these cases of change, we ask how and under what conditions they occurred, and what can be learned from 'successful' examples of citizen mobilizations changing national policy.
Each of the subsequent chapters in this volume attests to the power of people to make change happen. They fundamentally affirm that citizens can engage with states to create policy reforms which are important to the lives of poor people and for achieving social justice, but that intensive, long-term, organized collective action and coalition-building are required to do so. When this ensues, the results can be significant:
• In South Africa, the Treatment Action Campaign led to public recognition of HIV/AIDS as an issue, and to over sixty thousand people gaining access to publicly supplied antiretroviral medicines (Chapter 2).
• In the Philippines, the National Campaign for Land Reform secured the redistribution of half of the country's farmland to 3 million poor households, contributing to their economic rights and livelihoods (Chapter 3).
• In Mexico, a campaign to reduce maternal mortality put the issue of maternal healthcare on the national agenda in an unprecedented way, contributing to important changes in national budget priorities and health delivery mechanisms at the local level (Chapter 4).
• In Chile, an NGO-led campaign on child rights attained a new policy framework benefiting children, contributing to a decrease in child poverty (Chapter 5).
• In India, a grassroots-inspired campaign led to the passage of a strong National Right to Information law in 2005, and also provided impetus for further laws to enhance social security based upon new structures of public accountability (Chapter 6).
• In Brazil, the Right to the City campaign established a national framework for citizen participation in urban planning, critical to achieving housing and other social rights (Chapter 7).
• In Morocco, a women's social movement carried out a successful campaign for reform of the moudawana, the Islamic family law affecting women's rights (Chapter 8).
• In Turkey, a campaign for women's rights led to a new penal code with thirty-five amendments for the protection of sexual rights (Chapter 9).
Such policy changes, at best momentous and at least stepping stones towards future significant reforms, also constitute steps towards internationally recognized development goals, and social and economic rights. Several of these gains link directly to the donor-established Millennium Development Goals – for instance, those related to gender equality (Morocco and Turkey), maternal health (Mexico), combating HIV/AIDS (South Africa), and ending poverty and hunger (Philippines). Others represent the sixty-year-old struggle to realize basic social and economic rights enshrined in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, such as those advancing child rights in Chile, housing rights in Brazil or women's rights in Morocco and Turkey. Others still establish the preconditions necessary for realizing these economic and social rights – for instance, the right to information in India and popular participation in urban planning in Brazil. By gleaning lessons for how change happens from case studies such as these, we can build more successful movements and provide better-attuned support towards achieving these international goals for development, social justice and deeper democratic engagement.
Project and case study background
While these cases are both inspirational and instructive, they have inevitably been shaped by their own particular contexts. The eight countries from which the cases are drawn are largely classified as middle-income nations, notwithstanding the high levels of inequality and large numbers of poor people within them. Each has at least a modicum of democratic space, which is a prerequisite for citizen engagement on national policy issues, but is not a given everywhere. Each has a functioning state apparatus, another prerequisite for effective action on policy change, for without a functioning state there are few incentives to change its policies in the first place.
To a degree, these characteristics may limit the extent to which conclusions can be drawn for how change happens in other settings which lack these qualities. On the other hand, the fact that the successes arose in these contexts is an important finding in itself. In embarking on this project, we used our extensive networks to purposively seek nominations for examples of significant national-level policy changes which involved a high degree of civil society mobilization or collective citizen action, and which presented very strong evidence of being able to make a difference for social justice and the material well-being of large numbers of people. Because we were interested in 'developing' or at least non-Western countries, we excluded countries in the global North.
Despite our attempts to capture diversity, most of the cases repeatedly nominated were in emerging or existing democracies characterized by functioning states and at least some democratic space. So it may be that rather than reflecting a sampling bias, this pattern arose precisely because these are the kinds of settings where we can most expect collective citizen action on national policy to emerge. Such purposive case study sampling, as well as the 'thick description' case study approach we have used, affords us understandings of the complexities of change processes in these settings, as well as suggesting broader propositions about how change happens, which then can be explored more fully elsewhere.
Following the selection of cases, the process of developing this volume has been an inductive and interactive one, involving experienced researchers who were either from or deeply involved with the countries from which the cases are chosen. These researchers first came together in a workshop in Washington in 2005 to share an early overview of the proposed case for study. At that meeting, pooling their knowledge of the cases involved, the researchers collectively identified key themes for exploration. Refined over time, these have continued to shape the project. In early 2006, the researchers met again in Johannesburg, to discuss emerging findings and to hone some nascent propositions. A synthesis workshop followed in November 2006, where propositions were further developed and suggestions were made for deepening each of the cases. Since that time, the work has emerged in various iterations – the full in-depth cases published online in 2007, a set of policy briefs and a short synthesis for policy-makers (Gaventa 2008) and finally this collection.
Participation and national policy change: citizen 'voice' or collective action?
The themes of the book help to inform, and are informed by, a number of key debates in the literature about the importance of 'the national' as an arena of change and the role of citizen participation, voice and advocacy in the policy process. This literature, we argue, needs to be read in conjunction with a somewhat separate stream of literature on collective action and social movements, with which many of our findings resonate. By linking a collective action approach to questions of how national policy change happens, our findings will suggest a more contentious and political approach to the policy process, and to ideas about citizen participation within it, than the narrative which has dominated many development and democracy debates in recent years. By offering core propositions about how change happens from this series of empirically grounded cases in the global South, we also hope to contribute to the existing social movement literature as well.
The importance of 'the national' During the 1990s a number of writers began to speak of the decline of the nation-state, and with it the weakening of national policy arenas for bringing about significant changes in social policies that affected poor people. On the one hand, many argued that with globalization new forms of global authority were emerging, breaking the monopoly of legitimate state power linked to national governments (Rosenau 2002). On the other hand, there was a greater emphasis on 'the local', on approaches to decentralization, which arguably would bring governments closer to the people they were meant to reach. Simultaneously, arguments of globalization and decentralization were connected with notions of neoliberalism, which urged the weakening of state control and the expansion of unfettered market forces.
Many scholars and activists concerned with questions of where and how organized citizen engagement could make a difference followed a parallel trajectory. On the one hand, with a decline of attention to 'the national project', the focus of many shifted to the new opportunities for empowered forms of participation in governance at the local level offered through decentralization (McGee et al. 2003; Gaventa 2004; Cornwall and Schattan Coelho 2006). On the other hand, the last few years have seen an explosion of work on the need for new forms of global citizen action, which could influence global policies and players (Edwards and Gaventa 2001; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Tarrow 2005). National-level change represented something of a 'missing middle'.
In recent years, however, the importance of 'the national' has regained prominence in academic, development and advocacy circles. Even work along the twin axes of globalization, on the one hand, and decentralization, on the other, often began to point to the significance of the nation-state as a mediating and necessary force for change. As Houtzager, among others, has argued
the territorially defined nation-state today remains the only actor able to extract the vast resources from society that make possible significant distributive and redistributive policies, and the only actor capable of providing public goods on significant scale. It is also the only organizational form of authority with which most people have contact in their daily lives and that provides the most readily available route for poor social groups to influence the conditions of their own lives. (Houtzager and Moore 2005: 4)
The assertion has proven itself in practice in a number of contexts. In Latin America, social movements in countries such as Bolivia and Brazil focused on capturing national political power as a way to achieve their goals. International NGOs began to recalibrate their global campaigns to include change at the national level, recognizing that international gains on issues such as debt, trade, climate or the Millennium Development Goals required national, as well as international, commitment. And during the global financial crisis of 2009, in both North and South, growing attention has been paid to how nation-states can respond, providing safety nets to global forces through national policies and occasionally asserting their regulatory power over failed global systems.
The resurgence of the national has also been seen clearly as a factor in the development arena. The World Bank's 2004 World Development Report argues, for instance, that 'making services work for poor people involves changing not only service delivery arrangements but also public sector institutions' (2004: 1), including national governments. But, as J. Fox argues, 'the causal processes through which institutions become pro-poor are less well understood' (2005: 68). The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 argued strongly for 'national ownership', in which partner countries 'exercised effective leadership over their development policies and strategies, and co-ordinated development actions'. Increasingly aid discourse focused on 'building effective states' (DfID 2006), which could be capable, accountable and responsive to poor people, while also worrying about countries labelled as 'failed states' and therefore by implication not able to respond to pressing poverty and social needs.
Participation with the state: citizen voice in democratic policy processes As 'the national' has regained importance in development circles, so too have debates developed on how citizens could gain voice in shaping national policies that affect their lives. Traditionally, in much of the mainstream literature, national policy was the province of elites – government officials, technocrats or experts with little concern for or focus on public involvement (Grindle and Thomas 1991). Increasingly that paradigm has also been challenged, as broader, more inclusive understandings of democracy and governance have come to the fore. Policy processes themselves are now widely understood in the literature as needing more inclusive stakeholder participation, and as involving networks of actors, with different sources of knowledge and legitimacy.
For democracy reformers, expanding citizen engagement in the policy arena is about the deepening or extension of democracy itself (Dryzek 2000; Fung and Wright 2003; Gaventa 2005). The project is one of extending the scope of citizen involvement from choosing representatives through elections, who in turn make policies, to a more substantive role, which engages citizens throughout the policy-making process – from defining priorities, to shaping policy proposals, to monitoring implementation. A growing literature exists on how to achieve such deepened forms of democracy and on how to develop more deliberative and inclusive approaches to policy issues (Chambers 2003; Clarke 2002), yet much of this has focused at the local level, or on forms of consultation and deliberation which lack substantive influence in creating new policy change.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Citizen Action and National Policy Reform by John Gaventa, Rosemary McGee. Copyright © 2010 John Gaventa and Rosemary McGee. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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